Narratives may comprise written accounts of connected events. A story may include a narrative, actors or characters, and descriptive elements. Written stories are a primary way that many people consume news and entertainment. Many stories have a dynamic quality in that the story may change over time. News stories are updated as new related events occur, requiring news providers to gather new information, generate new text, and update any previous version of the story or author a completely new story.
Many people consume news stories in electronic form on various types of user devices. There is therefore a large availability of electronic narrative data which can be processed by computing devices. Because of the large amount of information available via public and private networks in electronic form, processing such data becomes increasingly difficult.
Linguistic computing presents a number of challenges in terms of defining relationships between complex story events.